It’s not a book for summer. Despite the yellow checkered cover, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which came out in September, is most certainly a winter book. The yellow is wrong anyway, not the yellow of sun, but instead tinged with a sickness, the checkered pattern alternating between subdued yellow and gray. Like a jaundiced hue, the cover blends in with the orange and marigold seats on the subway, configuration and color of a D train about to be defunct. Shortly after Intermezzo came out, my ex bought me a copy at Target. It was from the Brooklyn Target in Caesar’s Bay with a view of Coney Island on one side and the Verrazzano on the other. It was still warm, the waves outside the box stores lapping like summer. And I thought, how wonderful it must be to have every type of literary success. Rooney is equally displayed at indie bookstores, on the cool hotgirl IG pages, and also under the bright, antiseptically illuminated aisles of big box stores. But it took several attempts to truly commit to this book.